Plus ça Change. . . Perceptions of New Orleans English Before and After the Storm

1. Introduction

Research in perceptual dialectology has demonstrated that people have strongly held ideologies about their own language use and that of others. Most studies that have examined folk beliefs about language, noting the place-linked taxonomies that individuals espouse when it comes to language usage, have looked at entire countries (Preston 1986, 1996, 2003; Hartley 2005; Jeon & Cukor-Avila 2015; Mitchell, Lesho & Walker 2017; Alfaraz & Mason 2019), or, in some cases, have zeroed in on a state or region (Fought 2002; Benson 2003; Evans 2013; Drager & Grama 2014; Cramer, Tamasi & Bounds 2018; Braun 2020). We present here a more focused study: that of a single metropolitan area. In New Orleans, allegiances to one’s home neighborhood may be sacred. This is evidenced by varied expression of micro-level place identity, ranging from neighborhood-based Mardi Gras Indian tribes who meet for symbolic battles (ceremonial dances and chants, to flaunt the costumes that are distinctive to each tribe), to the common New Orleans slang term whoadie (friend), which derives from a non-rhotic realization of wardy—a fellow member of one’s ward, one of seventeen divisions of New Orleans districts. In addition to these expressions of neighborhood-based identity, many New Orleanians believe that local language practices vary by neighborhood (Alvarez & Kolker 1985), suggesting that language may be an additional vehicle for expressing neighborhood allegiance. We test this idea using the methods of perceptual dialectology, asking participants to draw mental maps of language usage within the metropolitan area. In addition, we consider the dimension of time by asking participants to draw an additional map ¹ identifying linguistic changes they have noticed since Hurricane Katrina flooded the city in 2005, causing lasting demographic changes due to largescale displacement immediately after the storm, as well as new arrivals of outsiders in the city who in some cases were the catalyst of “double displacement” as rapid gentrification in the past fifteen years has drastically and permanently changed the composition of many New Orleans neighborhoods. Adapting a traditional map drawing task to allow for “before and after” distinctions provided a visual/spatial way to probe local beliefs about the potential linguistic effects of these developments.

In light of previous research noting the potential significance of ethnicity, social class, and neighborhood in New Orleans English patterns (Rubrecht 1971; Alvarez & Kolker 1985), we focused on gathering perspectives from map drawers of diverse backgrounds, with the understanding that a participant’s personal history and identity may affect their perception of the variation they have encountered in the city (Mitchell, Lesho & Walker 2017; Alfaraz & Mason 2019). Two primary results emerge from the data: (i) Despite differences in ethnic identity, neighborhood residence, and social class, New Orleanians identify similar areas of the city as “accented.” However, the labels for these areas differ in notable ways between Black and white map drawers, which we argue reflects divergent social networks and experiences of New Orleans as a place. And (ii) though many participants did not opt to draw a second map, suggesting a lack of perceived linguistic change since the hurricane, those who did pointed to changes to the ethnic makeup of the city, including an influx of people of Latin American origin and an attendant decline in the number of Black and working-class white New Orleanians. We thus conclude that ethnicity in New Orleans is a key—if not the key—driver of local perceptions about linguistic variation and change. This study ultimately confirms the value of map-drawing tasks at the micro-level for determining neighborhood-based linguistic perceptions, as well as the important insights that can be provided by asking participants to draw multiple maps in order to better capture linguistic changes occurring over time and across space.

We begin, in section 2, by providing some spatial orientation to New Orleans and its environs to readers unfamiliar with the city’s layout and demographic patterns. In sections 3 and 4 we review the existing literature on dialect variation within the city and provide background on perceptual dialectology, to set the stage for interpretation of the map-drawing tasks that participants completed. These are detailed in section 5. We share the results of the perceptual dialectology maps drawn by participants in section 6, identifying the notable differences according to participant ethnicity and zooming in on the labels used by each group, according to frequency. A small number of participants opted to draw “before and after Katrina” maps, which we report on in section 7, and we end in sections 8 and 9 by contextualizing the trends in map-drawing based on the overall changes—demographic, ideological, and otherwise—that have taken place in New Orleans over time.

2. Spatial Orientation to the Crescent City: Before and After the Storm

A proper examination of linguistic variation in New Orleans and the perception thereof by locals cannot be undertaken without a grounding in the city’s complicated demographic history; this is especially true in work such as that undertaken here, which relies heavily on participants’ characterizations of different neighborhoods. We present a fairly detailed account, for that reason, in this section.

Established three hundred years ago, New Orleans is located on a strip of land bounded by water: Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River to the south (roughly). Numerous other waterways cut through the city, but the nickname “The Crescent City” comes from the bend of the Mississippi River upon which many of the oldest neighborhoods in the city—like the French Quarter, Marigny, and Garden District—are situated, perched upon the natural levee. Lower lying areas closer to Lake Pontchartrain (historically called the “back of town”) were later drained and added to the city’s footprint. Figure 1 shows the current boundaries of Orleans Parish, with neighborhoods outlined.

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Figure 1.

New Orleans Neighborhood Map

The French Quarter was the original colonial settlement, housing French immigrants and their enslaved African workforce; at the turn of the twentieth century, the Quarter was known more for its working-class Italian population, as many Sicilian immigrants arrived en masse in the late nineteenth century and replaced the historic (and departing) Creole residents (Campanella 2006). Today, much of the Quarter is devoted to tourism. The neighborhoods that lie just beyond the Quarter were known historically for their demographic diversity (Campanella 2006:3), though ongoing gentrification that began in the late twentieth century has changed their composition. Downriver Marigny and Bywater transformed from ethnically diverse neighborhoods where artists and service industry workers lived to areas housing predominantly white and wealthy transplants; these neighborhoods have become focal points for discussions of in-migration, gentrification, and cultural change in New Orleans (Blum 2019). Toward the Lake, the neighborhoods of Tremé, sometimes characterized as the oldest Black neighborhood in the country, and the Seventh Ward, considered the Creole heart of the city (Campanella 2006:216), have resisted gentrification until the past decade or so, but a post-Katrina market for “house-flipping,” and conversion into Airbnb rentals due to their proximity to tourist-friendly areas of the French Quarter has caused rapid—and oftentimes unwelcome—changes to these parts of town (Perkins 2019).

As happened elsewhere in the US in the 1960s, New Orleans experienced “white flight” from urban centers toward the suburbs. Notably, the working-class white residents known popularly as “Yats” moved from their urban homelands to suburban towns like Chalmette, located just downriver from the Lower Ninth Ward in rural St. Bernard Parish (Mucciaccio 2009; Carmichael 2014). Chalmette remains today a predominantly white, working-class suburb; local lore suggests it was also a primary destination for people of color seeking to “pass” (the first author has heard first-hand tales of accidental outings and of “Dalmatians,” a play on “Chalmatians,” that is, residents of Chalmette, thus named because they were “white with black spots”). The upriver suburbs of Metairie and Kenner were at the time home to predominantly middle-class white New Orleanians; Metairie remains so, though Kenner has become a destination for post-Katrina Latin American newcomers (Grimm 2015).

In the top right quadrant of the map, separated from the rest of New Orleans by the Industrial Canal, is New Orleans East, a key middle-class Black and Vietnamese area pre-Katrina (Campanella 2006:378). This low-lying area was hit hard by the storm, and is, perhaps tellingly, not even fully included on the map. The Lower Ninth Ward/Holy Cross neighborhoods are similarly separated from New Orleans by the Industrial Canal and were also hard-hit by Katrina. These neighborhoods were home to many working- and middle-class Black New Orleanians before the storm (Campanella 2006:378); today they are far less densely populated, with many tracts left vacant. Driveways and concrete steps leading nowhere are common in these neighborhoods. West of the Industrial Canal, the St. Claude and Gentilly neighborhoods were predominantly Black; residents represented a mixture of working- and middle-class homeowners and renters. Across City Park from these neighborhoods lie the wealthy, white Lakeview and Lake Vista neighborhoods, while the more racially and socioeconomically diverse Midcity neighborhood abuts the park to the South. Though Uptown on this map represents a small sliver of land, the phrase “Uptown” is used more broadly to describe all the neighborhoods upriver of downtown New Orleans and south of Central City (Martinez & LaCorgne 1986). While there is quite a bit of economic and racial/ethnic diversity in this wide swath of the city, an assumption of “uptown wealth” can be traced to the impression of opulence given off by St. Charles Avenue mansions and the adjacent Garden District that is often extended to the entire area. Neworleans.com, a tourism website for the city, writes of Uptown: “Vibe: Majestic, manicured and inspiring; Known for: Grand mansions” (Neworleans.com 2022). Though the sub-header notes that the description includes the Central City, the Riverbend, and Irish Channel neighborhoods and a longer description that accompanies the one cited above mentions shotgun homes on narrow lots and names historically Black neighborhoods and streets therein (Oretha Castle Haley Blvd, the Black Pearl), both the longer description and the short one cited above notably elide the presence of lower income or middle class residents and avoid the issue of racial/ethnic diversity entirely, choosing instead to remark on “white tablecloths” and “satsuma orange ice cream,” as though the entire area were wealthy and—to use their term—opulent. Although historically sparsely populated, the Northshore of Lake Pontchartrain has steadily increased in population since the 1990s, as Figure 2 shows. This area has been the site of white flight since the crime wave of the 1990s and has been a key destination post-Katrina as well (Lasley 2012), and is now predominantly home to white, middle-class suburbanites, some of whom traverse the twenty-three-mile-long causeway bridge to New Orleans daily for work.

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Figure 2.

North Shore Migration, 1980 to 2010

Although many of the demographic shifts described above were long underway, it is impossible to discuss change in New Orleans without addressing the effects of Hurricane Katrina, which flooded New Orleans and permanently displaced many residents in 2005. Black residents were hit hardest, since many Black neighborhoods were on lower-lying land that took more water, like the Lower Ninth Ward. Post-Katrina, the city lost 100,000 Black residents, but only 11,500 white residents; the end result was a whiter New Orleans (Blum 2019). A large Latin American population also arrived at this time, many of whom worked in the construction industry rebuilding the city (Grimm 2015). Another development was ideological: newcomers ramped up the existing pride in and performance of New Orleanian identity—often by way of appropriation of distinct linguistic and cultural features (Schoux Casey 2013; Carmichael & Dajko 2016). Thus, both place identity and local linguistic features have become more central to the shared New Orleans cognizance post-Katrina, warranting further investigation into these sociolinguistic schemas and how they are understood by residents in the city.

3. Language Practices in New Orleans: Then and Now

Documentation of pre-Katrina New Orleans English derives mostly from larger language surveys that include a handful of New Orleanians (e.g., Rubrecht 1971; Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006), and Masters theses and dissertations completed by local students (e.g., Reinecke 1951). Since the surveys mostly do not account for specific neighborhoods or ethnic groups, they provide “broad strokes” descriptions; that said, Rubrecht’s (1971) study notably distinguishes the “Irish Channel” accent within New Orleans—a white, working-class brogue sometimes called “Yat.” And indeed, Yat is one of the better studied speech varieties in New Orleans (e.g., Mucciaccio 2009; Carmichael 2014), often characterized as “the” New Orleans dialect (e.g., Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006). Many speakers of Yat now live in outer suburbs like Chalmette, though even in this stronghold of Yat-dom, traditional features are on the retreat (Carmichael 2014, 2017, 2020). Despite the change in the actual linguistic landscape, nostalgia for Yat accents drives a perception of Yats as authentic New Orleanians par excellence—though this is complicated by competing valuations of the speech of Black New Orleanians as equally authentic (Coles 1997, 2003; Dajko et al. 2012; Carmichael & Dajko 2016).

One description of key pre-Katrina variation in New Orleans comes from the documentary “Yeah, You Rite!” (Alvarez & Kolker 1985), which posits three general dialects: a wealthy white “Uptown” dialect, a working-class white “Downtown” dialect, and Black speech (assigned neither a geographic nor social class identifier). Circulating folk beliefs suggest that variation patterns by neighborhood or even by street. ² Whether these perceived lines are linguistic realities has yet to be established.

While some of the above studies include Black participants, the only research to date that focuses specifically on the speech of Black New Orleanians are studies of children’s acquisition. These include Walker’s (1972) examination of the linguistic environment of Black preschoolers, White-Sustaíta’s (2012) work on the syntax of children acquiring African American English, and Charity’s (2007) paper on regional variation in the speech of low socio-economic status African American English-speaking children. New Orleanians are also included in the population of research participants that informs the descriptions of African American English (AAE) that appear in Pardoe (1937), Green (2002), and Carpenter (2009). Thus, while the literature above provides some information about New Orleans AAE, to date there is no systematic description of AAE features in the city.

Some research has asserted the existence of a variety of English linked to ethnic Creoles—generally mixed race, light-skinned descendants of historically Francophone Free People of Color, and/or other higher status people of color—although very little linguistic research has focused specifically on the speech of Creole populations. Rahm Malin (1972) performed a lexical survey across several demographics, attempting to draw some conclusions regarding variation; this study was updated in 1983 by Aubert-Gex, whose goal was specifically to determine the variables associated with Creole identity. The only other study to focus specifically on the English spoken by Creoles was an Honors thesis (Douglas 1969) examining the speech of native Francophone Creoles, not all of whom were born and raised in New Orleans (in itself an interesting methodological choice that has implications for the nature of the Creole community in Louisiana). Creole identity, stressing its French origins, is likely the underlying motivator in approval of French terms (specifically, buku ‘a lot, very,’ from beaucoup) in modern New Orleans English (Dajko 2018).

Only in the past few years has any research been completed on the growing Latin American population (Lewis 2019), and the small but significant Vietnamese population is addressed by a single article (Truitt 2019). Recent research (e.g., Schoux Casey 2016; Dajko 2018) has compared Black, white, and Creole participants in studies both of production and ideology, suggesting this to be a fruitful direction for research. Still, there remains much to do to document the linguistic variation in New Orleans English, and to confirm or refute the assertions of linguists and residents alike about the linguistic significance of spatial, racial, and socioeconomic divisions in the city, not to mention to better understand how these factors may have been affected by demographic shifts.

4. Perceptual Dialectology Research and Map-drawing Tasks

Preston (1986, 1996) explains that perceptual dialectology allows us to get into the minds of everyday speakers. The need to do this arises from the fact that, as Iannàccaro and Dell’Aquila (2001:267) note, “there is often a significant difference between etic isoglosses, that is, ‘objective’ boundaries between areas of different language use constructed by outside observers; and the linguistic emic spaces of the speakers of the language” (italics original). Comparing the two can help us to understand the features that are both socially embedded and used to organize our experience (Fridland 2008:70) and that may even indicate the direction of language change (Irvine & Gal 2000).

The array of methods used in perceptual studies of language variation includes map drawing, pile sorting, and evaluations of a regional variety’s “correctness” or “pleasantness” based on impressions. It may also include matched guise tests, in which participants listen to recordings of speakers and then evaluate them for social features (intelligence, friendliness, reliability, and so on). Each of these activities provide information targeted at “bridging the ‘gap’ between language attitudes research and social dialectological studies” (Montgomery 2016:185). Map-drawing tasks in particular allow for ascertaining nonlinguists’ beliefs about the number and distribution of language varieties across space, and via examination of the types of labels assigned to these varieties, their social value. Most commonly, map-drawing tasks involve presenting participants with a blank map of a specific country or other broad geographic area and asking the individual to circle the areas where people speak with an accent, or speak differently from each other, and provide a descriptive label. While many studies have drawn from undergraduate student populations (e.g., Preston 1996; Fought 2002; Evans 2013) due to ease of access to this population, some recent work has recruited participants “on the street” out in the community in question in the form of a rapid anonymous survey (e.g., Mitchell, Lesho & Walker 2017).

Large-scale, country-level map-drawing tasks typically focus on participants from a given area indicating their beliefs about regions that they may have varying experience with. Carmichael (2016), for example, analyzes the sources of linguistic awareness that map-drawing participants claim they drew upon, including media and personal experience in the locales in question, both of which are used to construct place-based linguistic schema. And Montgomery (2012) points out the significance of both physical proximity and psychological prominence in where dialectological divisions are identified by map drawers. Despite these varied influences on map-drawing, there are many frequently reproduced effects in terms of social and geographic judgments about regional dialects; for example, Preston (1996) famously demonstrates that map-drawers from Michigan and Alabama agree on “where the worst English is spoken” in the US, due to overarching supra-regional language ideologies. That said, a number of locales without as much broader linguistic awareness surrounding their dialects—such as Washington state (Evans 2013), Hawaii (Drager & Grama 2014), and Wisconsin (Braun 2020) for example—have benefited from more local examination; that is, instead of focusing on what speakers from a given locale think about other regional dialects, these studies posed the question of what local distinctions exist, on the state level, according to residents who presumably have first-hand knowledge of these ways of speaking. Only a handful of city-level map-drawing studies have been carried out, examining neighborhood-level linguistic associations. Lonergan’s (2016) examination of Dublin, Ireland, notes how labels for areas of the city (northside/southside) are used in place of class-based terms relating to working-class and upper-class ways of speaking. Meanwhile, Callesano (2020) finds that, in Miami, certain areas are more highly associated with Cuban Spanish than others, and moreover that heritage language speakers of Spanish specifically identify one particular neighborhood (Hialeah) as the heart of Cuban Spanish in the city, while non-heritage speakers are more disperse in their neighborhood identifications. In New Orleans, both neighborhood affiliation and linguistic awareness are high, lending particular promise to the exercise at this level.

5. Methodology

Given previous claims that local New Orleanians consider dialectal variation to be tied to specific parts of the city, and notably to ethnic groups and social classes that are associated with certain neighborhoods/wards (Alvarez & Kolker 1985), we administered a map-drawing task, modeled off those conducted by Preston (1986, 1996, 2003). Of additional concern in this study, as previously noted, is the dimension of time. Traditional perceptual exercises, like the map drawing we employ here, present a static picture of variation, a moment in time. But language is always changing, and attitudes and ideologies may change along with it. Especially in New Orleans, where drastic demographic and sociopolitical changes have occurred in the years since Hurricane Katrina made landfall in 2005, it is crucial to clearly consider the way language practices have evolved. For this reason, we sought to capture, via a second pair of maps, not just how New Orleanians currently view the spatial distribution of language practices in the city, but also to assess what linguistic changes they have noticed since the storm, and to consider how their understanding of language change is linked to their other social observations since the storm.

We provided participants with two maps that had minimal landmarks indicated (Figures 3 and 4). One of the maps presented the city proper, and one presented the greater New Orleans area, encompassing the suburbs that are part of the general cultural zone, including the area across Lake Pontchartrain. We asked participants to circle or otherwise indicate areas, using both maps, where they felt people spoke differently from each other, and to label their areas. We then asked them to perform the task a second time (using clean versions of both maps), this time indicating the layout of pre-Katrina. We refer to these latter maps as “Change” maps, because what ultimately resulted in many cases were discussions and marking of shifts on the landscape (e.g., “More hipsters” on the second map), rather than clear pre- and post-Katrina maps. In any such task the need to help participants orient themselves must be balanced with the need to not create undue influence by labeling items that may be ideologically linked to linguistic variation. The landmarks we included were Audubon Park uptown, City Park, and the Fairgrounds in Midcity, the Superdome in the Central Business District, Chalmette Battlefield in the suburb of Chalmette, Chef Menteur Highway which leads out to New Orleans East, and the Mississippi River along which many key neighborhoods lie. Notably, the landmarks we included were not each circled or labeled by all participants; there is no indication that their inclusion biased participants to label specific sections of the city more than others.

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Figure 3.

Maps Used in Map-drawing Activity—City of New Orleans and Near Suburbs

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Figure 4.

Maps Used in Map-drawing Activity—City of New Orleans, Lake Pontchartrain, and Far Suburbs on the Northshore

A total of eighty-eight participants, all born and raised in Greater New Orleans, completed the map task. The participants included a roughly equal number of men and women. Fifty percent of the participants (N = 44) identified as white, 42 percent (N = 37) Black, and 7 percent (N = 6) professed some other ethnic identity; these numbers approximate the ethnic composition of Metro New Orleans, in which 93 percent of residents identify as either white or Black (U.S. Census Bureau 2020a). Two thirds of those who identified as neither white nor Black were in fact from suburban or even exurban areas; a targeted effort would be needed to collect adequate maps (especially for both pre- and post-Katrina maps, which requires that participants lived in the city before Katrina) from less-represented groups to generalize. In this paper, we therefore limit our discussion to a comparison of the two major ethnic groups in the city. Seventy-five percent of participants had a college degree or even post-graduate degrees; the average age for participants was 39.3 years old. Participants were recruited in public spaces—at bus stops, gas stations, bars, and festivals. In some cases, participants dictated their map drawing to us, identifying areas to be circled and verbally describing them, instead of drawing on the paper themselves.

While we found that conducting a perceptual dialectology map-drawing task on the smaller scale was ultimately successful and produced some insights, it did pose some challenges. Though we included a few landmarks to help orient people, some participants struggled to identify the location of neighborhoods that they know well because they were not used to using a city map (as local residents who know their way around). Additionally, as is typical in map-drawing exercises, there was relatively wide variation in the level of detail that participants provided. A few participants either circled only the suburb of Chalmette with no further comment or simply circled the entire map and labeled it “New Orleans English.” Conversely, a few participants not only circled and labeled their maps; they also provided examples of linguistic variation in the margins. Figures 5 and 6 provide examples of the two extremes, although most participants fell toward the middle of the continuum.

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Figure 5.

Minimal Map

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Figure 6.

Elaborated Map

6. Map Survey Results

Over forty locations were identified across all the maps as being the sites of specific linguistic practices. The most frequently circled by far (75 percent of maps) was the eastern suburb of Chalmette. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that it is the new locus, at least in the public imagination, for the Yat dialect (Mucciaccio 2009; Carmichael 2014). The next most frequently identified locations were Uptown (32 percent of maps), the western suburb of Metairie (25 percent), and New Orleans East (24 percent). Strikingly, half of these locations are suburbs, and New Orleans East is a far outlying region of the city. This makes sense: it is common for urbanites to try to distance themselves from their suburban neighbors.

While Chalmette was the most frequently marked location by map drawers of all ethnicities, Black and white map drawers do feature some notable differences, represented in Table 1.

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Table 1.

Most Frequently Identified Neighborhoods on Map Drawing Exercise, by Ethnicity of Participant

White participants (N = 179)	Black participants (N = 103)
Chalmette (22%)	Chalmette (21%)
Uptown (10%)	Ninth Ward (9%)
New Orleans East (8%)	New Orleans East (7%)
Metairie (7%)	Uptown (6%)
Midcity (6%)	“Everyone speaks the same way” (5%)
Slidell (5%)	Midcity (4%)
Westbank (4%)	7th Ward (4%)
Mandeville (4%)	Gert Town/Hollygrove (4%)

Note: N here meaning number of responses, that is, labels, not number of participants, which is detailed earlier in the paper.

Key differences in this list correlate with areas where white versus Black residents live; white New Orleanians mark predominantly white suburbs like Slidell, Metairie, and Mandeville, while the list generated by Black participants instead features neighborhoods predominantly occupied by Black residents. Black participants are also more likely than are white participants to say that everyone speaks the same in the city. The overlap of Midcity and Uptown on lists by both Black and white map drawers is explained by the fact that both are broader toponyms than the neighborhood level that may in fact be used differently by residents of different ethnic backgrounds. For example, Midcity might refer to the predominantly white neighborhoods surrounding City Park, or to the predominantly Black neighborhoods along Tulane Avenue. Uptown might be used to refer to the predominantly white neighborhoods along St. Charles Avenue and near Audubon Park, or it might be used to describe the neighborhoods around Carrollton or Tchoupitoulas that are more ethnically diverse.

Not only did Black and white participants differ in what areas they marked, they also differed in the descriptive labels that most frequently appeared on their maps. Figures 7 and 8 compare Black and White labels; larger text indicates higher frequency of response by the ethnicity in question (see also Tables A1 and A2 in the Appendix).

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Figure 7.

Neighborhood Labels Used by Black Participants

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Figure 8.

Neighborhood Labels Used by White Participants

While there is agreement that Lakeview (in the upper right-hand side of the map) and the uptown area around Audubon Park (the lower right-hand side) are essentially standard (and wealthy), and that Midcity is diverse (or, as one map puts it, “half hood, half proper”), Black and white respondents notably disagree on the nature of Chalmette and its relationship to the lower Ninth Ward. White residents consistently label the area with Yat or derivatives thereof (e.g., “yatty”). Black participants, however, call it “country.” Meanwhile, white residents give the adjacent lower Ninth Ward labels like “Ebonics,” “ghetto,” “trash,” and “ignorant.” Black residents label it Creole and suggest it has a heavier Southern accent. The term Yat appears only once on maps made by Black participants; white participants use it thirty-four times. White residents, however, use the term Creole only once, in labeling the lower Ninth Ward. For Black participants, both the lower Ninth Ward and Chalmette are Creole and country. White participants show a very clear divide between the “Yatty” suburb and the “Trashy” lower Ninth Ward where “Ebonics” is spoken (the sole attestation of “Yats” on that map can be attributed to the fact that the lower Ninth Ward was historically diverse and is the traditional homeland of the working-class white population that now centers on Chalmette). In fact, for one participant—a white male from Chalmette—this divide was the only one that mattered (Figure 9).

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Figure 9.

Map with Only Ebonics (Ninth Ward) and Yat (Chalmette) Marked

White participants, it would seem, are suggesting that Chalmette is exclusively white, while Black participants assert the existence of racial diversity in Chalmette. One Black participant notes that Chalmette is “extremely biracial”; others label it Creole. Notably, while Chalmette was 80-90 percent white before the storm (U.S. Census Bureau 2000), post-Katrina shifts have resulted in a drop to 61 percent white, with the rest of the population 24 percent Black, 10 percent Latin American, 5 percent other (U.S. Census Bureau 2020b). Thus, the differing views of Chalmette may represent distinctions in awareness of Chalmette’s post-storm demographic trends—or in the network of associations that individuals have in Chalmette, resulting in their view of Chalmette as majority white, or more diverse.

In looking at the labels participants provided, it becomes evident that some can be thematically grouped; doing so makes the social factors participants use to label their city clear. Entries such as “Yat,” “Yatty,” “Charmers,” and “Brooklynese” are references to working class whites; we can collapse them under the label “Yat.” Meanwhile, “ghetto,” “Ebonics,” and “hood” can be grouped together under “Black.” Black participants, in particular, often cited specific greetings (whazzam, homie, what’s up, son) or terms of endearment (baby, cher, dawlin’), both of which we collapsed under “interpersonal exchanges.” Table 2 presents the results.

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Table 2.

Labels Used by Black and White Participants on all Maps

White participants (N = 61)		Black participants (N = 41)
Term	Attestations	Term	Attestations
Yat	55%	Interpersonal exchanges	30%
Black	29%	Black	30%
Rich	6%	Country	20%
Trash	3%	Southern	17.5%
Country	1.6%	Yat	2.5%
Southern	3%
Interpersonal exchanges	1.6%

We suggest that the themes for the labels reflect different worldviews and different ways of categorizing people socially. White participants are focused on racial and economic divides, with “Black” noting racial differentiation from their own group, “Yat/trash” used to distance themselves from working class whites, and “rich” used (clearly without intent to flatter) to identify the upper echelon of the city. Black participants mention Blackness at the same rate as whites do, but their responses seem to instead be ways of characterizing their own Blackness, with “interpersonal exchanges” (greetings and terms of endearments) taking center stage. This is in keeping with previous research on authentic speech both in New Orleans (Dajko et al. 2012) and elsewhere (Mitchell, Lesho & Walker 2017) that have found the same focus on interpersonal relationships within the Black community. In short, when asked to tell a researcher about New Orleans, white respondents talk about social divisions; Black respondents tell the researcher what it means to be Black in New Orleans.

Black participants in the present study also label parts of the city “country” and “Southern,” two terms that rarely appear on white participants’ maps. Whites only call distant exurban areas “country,” and the term “Southern” appears to describe an upper class, genteel Southern dialect, given its placement when it appears (over the Garden District), rather than the working-class version it clearly references on the Black participants’ maps. When Black participants were probed further about the meaning of “country” and “Southern” as marked on maps, they suggested that these terms pointed to social qualities (being laidback, or lacking pretension) rather than linguistic features. This notable semantic difference in the way these terms are used could cause confusion on map tasks if interpreted within a single framework. We thus recommend deeper consideration about culturally- and ethnically-specific terminology in future work, especially in folk linguistic research that considers data from varying groups, in order to ensure that similarities are not being claimed when in fact connotations for certain descriptors differ.

7. Pre- and Post-Katrina Maps

While all participants were offered the opportunity to draw maps indicating change since Hurricane Katrina (i.e., “Change” maps), few decided to do so. It is of course impossible for us to be certain of the reasons for this opting out of the activity, but given the results detailed below, we interpret this pattern not as admission that no change has happened, but more that the linguistic changes that are occurring were challenging for participants to capture in a map (and frankly, some may just not have wanted to lengthen the time it took to complete the exercise, since participants were approached in public spaces while completing everyday tasks like shopping, walking to work, or pumping gas). Some of the “Change” maps were minimally marked with variations of “No difference”; these were not included in the analysis below. Each of nine participants (six white, two Black, one Middle Eastern) drew two maps documenting change—one zoomed in on New Orleans proper, one zoomed out to include the overall metro area including Northshore suburbs, just as they had for the preliminary exercise. The eighteen resulting maps indicated that perceived changes post-Katrina focus on two things: (1) movement to the far suburbs on the North shore (especially of white suburbanites) and (2) the arrival of transplants in New Orleans proper (both white and Latin American).

The movement to the North shore is highlighted in particular on the maps (as shown in Figure 10), with the area to the north of Lake Pontchartrain labeled “More Yats than before,” “More Yats from Chalmette,” and “St. Tammanard” (a crude combination of St. Tammany Parish on the Northshore and St. Bernard Parish, where Chalmette is located). The dilution of authenticity and/or change in identity that comes with such a move is noted on a map that suggests residents on the north shore speak “St. Tammanard-ese,” which the participant further describes as “Down the Road [i.e., St. Bernard Parish] with the edges filed off” (Figure A1, Appendix).

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Figure 10.

“After” Maps Noting Movement to the North Shore

Map-drawers are correct in observing that there has been large scale movement of St. Bernard Parish residents to the Northshore; US census estimates suggest nearly 25 percent of the Parish population moved to the Northshore post-Katrina (Lasley 2012:95). There is also evidence that these displaced Chalmatians are identifiable by their accents, as Carmichael (2014:159) documents in narratives from Chalmette residents who had relocated to the North shore: “People from Chalmette, they have a pretty distinct accent, that’s pretty recognizable around these parts [the Northshore].”

While Yats are moving out of the city and its close environs, transplants have come to take their place; the maps reflect this as well. Figures 11 and 12 show maps highlighting both of the processes of interest: the exodus from St. Bernard Parish (“Less Yats”) and the arrival in the city proper of strangers from out of state (“Influx of new people”).

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Figure 11.

Moving Out

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Figure 12.

Moving In

Two types of newcomers are of particular interest to our participants. The first is wealthy, white transplants from other urban centers, often characterized as hipsters. These newcomers are seen as the catalyst for the gentrification and concomitant ousting of long-term New Orleanians in the Bywater and Marigny neighborhoods in particular. In interviews we have conducted ³ and in casual conversations, natives often excoriate these people for not adjusting to local norms or for attempting to change local culture. Figure 13 presents an example: an “open letter” to Bywater hipsters posted to Reddit in 2014, imploring them to learn more about the city and contribute to it.

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Figure 13.

Open Letter to Bywater Hipsters Posted to Reddit

Conversely—and presenting a bit of a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” dilemma for new arrivals—these newcomer hipsters are also criticized for trying too hard to adopt New Orleans customs, for example, participating in too many second lines. Second line parades, semi-formal processions featuring club members in fancy dress (the first line), sometimes preceded by a simple float or two, and followed by first a hired brass band and behind that a mass of people (the second line) flooding the street and sidewalks and even dancing on porches or balconies alongside the parade, are held annually by Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs. Except during the hottest months of the summer and over Carnival, there is a second line somewhere in the city nearly every weekend. While anyone may join the second line, to attend a second line parade before Katrina one had to be in the know, with local connections to insiders with awareness of second line plans. Today, second line parades are advertised at local radio station WWOZ’s website, complete with start times and parade routes, including stops at local businesses for refreshments, thus removing some of the “insider” status requirements.

Hipsters are also credited with linguistic change, as the maps in Figures 14 and 15 show; hipsters are accused of bringing in dialects from all over the country. These dialects are noted for their lack of “placèdness” or “terroir” (Silverstein 2014). We see this in the labels “Hipsters not from here” (Figure 15) and “Hipster ‘I’m from anywhere,’ less traditional” (Figure 14).

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Figure 14.

Hipsters Not From Here/From Anywhere

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Figure 15.

Hipsters Not From Here

Our maps also demonstrated a distinct awareness of the increased presence of Latin American new arrivals (Figures A2 and A3, Appendix). And indeed, Latin American presence in New Orleans has doubled since Hurricane Katrina (Grimm 2015). While this only amounts to an increase from 1 percent to 2 percent of the overall population, the change is highly visible, with, for example, trucks serving street food (“Taco Trucks”) featuring menus printed in both English and Spanish. US Census data suggests the Latin American influx to the New Orleans area was most marked in the suburbs: while the census reports the use of Spanish by 3.89 percent of the population in Orleans Parish in the 2000 decennial census, the 2015 3-year estimate gives a rate of 4.2 percent—hardly a noticeable change. In neighboring Jefferson Parish (the home of middle-class suburban towns Metairie and Kenner), by contrast, the rate nearly doubles from 6.88 percent to 11.8 percent (U.S. Census Bureau 2015; CensusScope n.d.). Though there has been a Latin American community in New Orleans for over 100 years, the increased visibility of the community, bringing with it a new language and new food customs, is greeted with a similar wariness that greets the newly arrived hipsters, though for different reasons. While the hipsters are accused of being inauthentic wannabes with more money than sense, the Latin American community, in keeping with predominant negative stereotypes across the US (Hill 1998), is characterized as lazy and insular, unwilling to learn English. Their use of Spanish is a particular bone of contention.

In short, Yats, the authentic residents of New Orleans (who were already once-removed to the suburb of Chalmette) have moved out—farther yet to the Northshore of Lake Pontchartrain—and inauthentic newcomers have arrived to fill the void, bringing strange new customs and dialects—if not entirely new languages—with them. These newcomers are met with hostility by residents who feel their culture is endangered by the arrival of people with different ways of life. The newcomers are expected to assimilate, yet not try too hard to do so. Figure 16 displays, with a combination of bumper stickers on a coffee shop microwave, the outsider status of those who do not understand local Louisiana (‘LA’) traditions and wish for a more generic or trendy landscape (“L.A.” as in Los Angeles). Notably, “y@” or “Yat” indexes insider status, using a particularly linguistic nod to what counts as authentic.

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Figure 16.

Bumper Sticker about New Arrivals

Just as they had different characterizations of the city on their first maps, Black and white participants in our survey also disagreed to some degree on the nature of the change occurring in the city, as shown in Table 3. While focus on hipster transplants was comparable across the groups (four Black, six white responses), for white respondents, the most remarkable change is the white flight to the suburbs; this is mentioned six times on white respondents’ maps, but only once by Black respondents. On the other hand, the Latin American influx is exclusively mentioned by Black participants. Black participants were also more likely to note the departure of local accents and their replacement with non-regional diction both by outsiders and by returning locals (“Moving” in Table 3; four versus two responses), and they more often noted an increase in ethnic diversity. White participants were the only ones likely to mention the generational disappearance of the upper-class white dialect (“Rex English”). ⁴

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Table 3.

White Versus Black Participants’ Characterizations of Change

White participants mention:		Black participants mention:
Transplants	6	Transplants	4
Yats	5	Yats	1
Moving	2	Moving	4
Spanish/Hispanic influx	0	Spanish/Hispanic influx	4
Increased ethnic diversity	1	Increased ethnic diversity	3
Loss of “Rex English”	2	Loss of “Rex English”	0

8. Discussion

The results of the map-drawing activities suggest that in many ways, Black and white New Orleanians live in different cities. Put differently, they occupy the same space, but they live in different places. White residents talk about Yats and Chalmatians and “Da Parish”; Black residents talk about Creoles and use the label “country,” though they may not identify as Creole themselves. Black residents see New Orleans as a part of the South; this is at best marginally true for white residents (who, in interviews, have often overtly expressed opposition to being labeled Southern; Carmichael 2014). Conversely, when asked about the term Yat, Black residents note that it was largely unknown to them until very recently. White residents draw a very sharp line between the white working-class suburb of Chalmette and the Black working class Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood, but Black residents don’t see a harsh dividing line and suggest that people living in Chalmette are in fact biracial (“Creole,” “Extremely biracial”), as are those in the Lower Ninth Ward. The maps suggest that for white people there are three communities, as described in 1985 in Yeah, you rite!: upper-class white (Uptown and Lakeview), working-class white (Chalmette), and working-class Black (Lower Ninth Ward). For Black speakers there are only two: upper-class white and everyone else. The “different places” interpretation is further supported by the fact that participants only seemed to be describing variation within their own ethnic group. Mucciaccio (2009:35) notes similar pattern in her own examination of New Orleans English ideologies:

[R]acial divisions appear to be very marked within the city: many whites seem to know little about social subgroups within African American society, perceiving a cultural difference between the Seventh Ward Creole African Americans and other African Americans but being otherwise incapable of making in-group social distinctions. Similarly, the majority of African Americans with whom I spoke seemed not to recognize the word “Y’at” or its implications of class status.

White New Orleanians seem to be appealing to a chronotopic New Orleans that existed perhaps forty years ago (Carmichael & Dajko 2016). The maps make it clear that there is a general awareness amongst white New Orleanians that Yats, the most “authentic” New Orleanians for many (Coles 1997, 2003), no longer live primarily within city limits and are now most associated with suburban areas—including the Northshore. That said, they remain central to the local linguistic taxonomy of white New Orleanians. Maps drawn by white participants actively mourn the post-Katrina departure of authenticity—as Yats moved farther afield, and inauthentic hipsters arrived en masse to take their place.

This process is an example of what Irvine and Gal (2000) call fractal recursivity, in which contrasts that exist on one level are mirrored and repeated on a smaller scale. Just as Yats are contrasted with “regular” or even “inauthentic” New Orleanians, so all New Orleanians are opposed to hipster transplants. Longstanding New Orleanians “authenticate” (Bucholtz & Hall 2005) themselves by claiming authority on matters of language and culture. Hipsters who are “not from here” are conversely “denaturalized” (Bucholtz & Hall 2005); any claims they make to New Orleans language or culture are rejected, no matter how hard they try. Interviews with residents conducted independently of this exercise (see endnote 1) make this clear. When asked if they have ever met a “fake” New Orleanian and what the markers of that inauthenticity were, participants comment, for example, that:

Hipsters’ “boring” and “from anywhere” accents become treated as an iconization of their “boring” and otherwise unremarkable identities (Irvine & Gal 2000). There is also adequation (Bucholtz & Hall 2005) of other regions in play: surely, some of these transplants come bearing regionally marked features of their own. But the details of their provenance are never relevant beyond the strict “here–not here” binary.

In “after” maps we also see erasure (Irvine & Gal 2000) of the longstanding Latin American community in New Orleans. Erasure occurs when certain groups are rendered invisible, despite their clear presence and participation in a linguistic community; most often, this occurs to socially marginalized groups. Thus, the idea that New Orleans Latinos are all post-Katrina arrivals, and all native Spanish speakers, reveals that there is no conception of an English-speaking Latin American community (see Lewis 2019) whose heritage language may be contributing to local forms of English.

The “one space, two places” phenomenon we document here recalls similar work by Alfaraz and Mason (2019), who received strikingly different perceptual maps of American English from white and Latin American participants, and by Orleans (1973:116), who, in an examination of cognitive maps made by several groups of Los Angelinos, notes that “a city is many things to many people; different things to different people.” In these earlier studies, however, participants from different backgrounds differed significantly in the form of the regions they drew; in both studies, non-white and working-class participants drew much smaller, less detailed maps than did their white and/or wealthier counterparts. In those studies, the differences were attributed to the nature of the social interactions in which participants engaged—both the number of contacts a participant had and how far from their home their social circle extended, which was in part contingent on the nature of their employment—and their integration into the hegemonic culture. Alfaraz and Mason’s (2019) participants were native speakers of Spanish, for example, which the authors write may have affected their ability to distinguish regional variation in English. New Orleans, then, presents a striking contrast. While Black and white participants in New Orleans often seem to be talking about the distribution of their own racial/ethnic group across the landscape, they draw nearly identical maps of the city. The difference lies in how those maps are labeled, not in the shape of the maps themselves. If Orleans (1973) is correct in suggesting that the smaller maps drawn by less affluent and non-white participants can be attributed to a lack of social contacts outside their immediate neighborhoods, then the maps drawn in New Orleans point to a social structure that differs significantly from that of similar populations in other urban centers. While Black participants in Los Angeles were bound to their local neighborhoods and consequently drew smaller maps than did affluent whites with more widely distributed contacts, New Orleans’ Black and white populations are equally distributed on the landscape. That is, Black and white New Orleanians really do occupy the same space. Neighborhoods are connected through various lines, both kin- and work-based. While New Orleanians may feel strong ties to the neighborhood in which they were primarily raised, they nonetheless often talk of kin in other neighborhoods or have themselves moved back and forth across the city over their own lifetimes. It is clear, however, from the differential labeling of the maps, that Black and white New Orleanians move in different social (and linguistic) circles, even when those circles overlap spatially.

9. Conclusion

The patterns of spatial, racial, and class-based divisions drawn on maps by native New Orleanians indicate strong racial divisions; these divisions extend even to the linguistic taxonomy that participants of different ethnicities represent. We describe this pattern as “one space, two places,” noting the ways that Black and white New Orleanians occupy overlapping spaces in the city but characterize these neighborhoods—and the related linguistic features of them—in divergent ways. We saw this mostly in the specific labels and themes that appeared in both pre- and post-Katrina maps, and in the groups that participants attended to.

This paper extend the perceptual dialectology map-drawing task in three key ways: (1) collecting maps from drawers of different ethnicities, to compare and contrast their linguistic and spatial perceptions; (2) focusing on map-drawing on a “micro” scale that looks at just variation across the city level; and (3) using “before and after” maps to document whether perceptions of linguistic variation has shifted in accordance with the large-scale demographic shifts following the storm. As has been the case with other studies that have documented map-drawing distinctions across ethnic groups, so too did we, demonstrating the importance of not only engaging in data collection from varied groups, but in acknowledging when a participant pool may only be indicative of the linguistic taxonomies of that group (for example, white American map-drawers). Map-drawing on the city scale posed some issues in terms of participants having a “city-level” mental map of neighborhoods, but, in the case of investigating purported neighborhood-based variation, this exercise was ultimately informative and successful. And finally, in terms of collecting maps drawn across time periods, this exercise proved to be a bit complex for our participants, who had to consider the intersection of place, time, and language—however, if considered as a method for initiating talk about language change in a specific locale, especially in a place experiencing rapid change, this approach provides some crucial insights.

In this paper, we have confirmed the importance of considering the folk taxonomies of locals in understanding the ways that language practices map onto speakers’ understandings of space and place. As Orleans (1973:130) reminds us, it is crucial that “as we confront anew the problems of urban life and recommit ourselves to seeking solutions based upon expertise, that we continually check our own world view with others who share the same matrix, even though or perhaps especially because our social worlds touch but fail to interpenetrate.” Indeed, in comparing maps drawn across participants and over time periods, we have seen the ways that individual and group patterning in perception of language practices across space, place, and time reflect the identities of the map-drawers. We have also provided some guidance for the future study of linguistic production within Greater New Orleans, which remains under-documented despite its status as a notably divergent linguistic area within the American South (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006).

Many local comments on changes in New Orleans after the storm have focused on gentrification, loss of long-standing local population, and newcomer arrivals, which have been shown to have linguistic effects in other locales (Johnstone, Andrus & Danielson 2006; Quartey & Schilling 2019). These changes intersect both with established ideas about the distribution of local accents across space as well as post-Katrina ideological shifts in what—and who—counts as (an) authentic New Orleanian, and how to make claims (linguistically and otherwise) to this coveted identity (Carmichael & Dajko 2016). These patterns in perception present key questions for production studies, namely: what linguistic variables in New Orleans English are key differentiating factors in the post-Katrina landscape? How are longstanding New Orleanian language practices changing in response to the changes in the city’s landscape, both in terms of newcomer arrivals and permanently relocated New Orleanians? And how has the shifting physical locus of traditional New Orleans English features, from city center, to outlying suburban towns, to the Northshore of Lake Pontchartrain, affected ideas about what features point to an authentic New Orleans identity? The answers to these questions can provide key insights about the ways that social and geographic changes, as well as personal affiliations and allegiances, affect language variation and change more broadly.